What A Pear

How can a business be both environmentally conscious and fun?

Overview

What A Pear is a creative business founded in collaboration with Lauren Sessa that combines skilled lettering and illustration with a shared love for food puns. Our plan was to create designs to be transferred onto a variety of kitchen items to sell at MICA’s annual Art Market.

Process

We began with a branding system that included a logo, business cards, tags, and a website. Once this was settled, we began with five different food puns and experimented with different methods of collaboration and visual styles. We applied these phrases to screen printed tea towels, aprons with screen printed and hand sewn patches, framed and unframed digitally printed shopping lists, wood burned cutting boards, and digitally printed decorative lists. The process called for handcrafting skills, which reinforced the hand-made and approachable aesthetic . We attempted to source materials through upcycling and reclamation, and created items that were simultaneously decorative and functional that would be valued and reused rather than discarded. Leading up to Art Market, we created and maintained a blog and Facebook page documenting our artistic and culinary processes.

Outcomes

We sold over 70% of our stock at MICA’s four day Art Market and continued to sell our goods through Etsy and word of mouth after the event.